Carrie Requist

Scott - one thing I am confused about at the current High School, if we are showing the population is under capacity, why are there teachers sharing rooms and having to live off a cart? To my knowledge, we didn't have that before this year.

We already tried a bandage approach with rebuilding Soda Creek. The lot is too small and the rebuilt school is too small, which is why we are in the situation we are in. This C2 plan will serve the district for a long time, which is what we need. Plus the addition of new fields (perhaps even a fieldhouse) at the larger location are amenities that server beyond just the student population.

Too bad that when Soda Creek was rebuilt it was not built to accommodate the expected growth even though that would have meant having to move it out of Old Town as the site is not large enough for a larger school.
Sibling preference makes sense to support families having all their elementary kids in the same school, but after that going to lottery does not seem like the best solution as it opens the real possibility that students who live walking distance from Soda Creek will be sent to Strawberry Park, increasing the driving traffic to both schools.
Once sibling numbers are determined, why not just shrink the Soda boundaries until the appropriate number of K students is reached?
This way you don't have a student from down 131 going to Soda while a student who lives on 6th street has to drive or bus to Strawberry.
What happened to the offer from HCS for space for the district? Another solution here would be to have all the Kindergartners (from both Soda and Strawberry) attend K out at HCS. Those classrooms are smaller, but K classrooms can be smaller.
I hope the architect and school building committee can work quickly so this is temporary as Strawberry can't take too much overflow and these kids will all feed into the overcrowded Middle School in six years and then into the very full High School 3 years after that.
A K-8 in the west Steamboat area (Silver Spur / Heritage Park / Steamboat II) seems like a very good option.

Correlation vs causation. I believe that our resource officer is new since 2013. A new officer with perhaps a new directive from her superiors or from the school administration is as plausible a reason for the increased incidents as an actual increase in MJ use.

I understand the beefed up enforcement, and can see valid reasons for it.

But the 4.7M dog bites statistic is irresponsible in the press release and in this article. Putting a national statistic in a local article makes no sense. A quick google search shows that 4.7M dog bite number coming up over and over again in various years. I did find a reference to that number - "According to a survey conducted in 1994 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 2% of the U.S. population—about 4.7 million people—are bitten by a dog each year. " Not only did they quote a national statistic, but one from almost 20 years ago, so it is not particularly valid. Even with that, the vast majority of those bites (from 1994) resulted in no injury, "The vast majority of these bites (about 83%) don’t result in injury, and no medical treatment is sought. About 800,000 individuals, however, half of them children, seek medical treatment for dog bites."

To put that in perspective - "To compare accidental injuries treated in emergency rooms, a person is roughly 23 times more likely to be injured from a fall than from a dog bite, 12 times more likely to be injured by a car, 7 times more likely to be injured by a sharp object and 1.5 times more likely to be injured by a bicycle."

So, if we are going to beef up patrols in order to reduce injury, those patrols should be looking more for things that people can trip over on the trail than for loose dogs.

Shame on the city and then on the paper for using statistics incorrectly and as a scare tactic. Informed people in a position of power have a responsibility not to feed into "lies, damn lies and statistics"

I am not worried that we will keep having major school projects every 6-7 years because of "unexpected circumstances." Rebuilding Soda Creek was short sighted and met only the immediate needs, not the growth. The rebuild only added 4 new classrooms to Soda Creek from what it previously had (from 24 to 28 classrooms). At the same time, an addition was made to Strawberry Park to give it 12 new classrooms, for a total of 16 new elementary classrooms. Had we repaired Soda and built a new school out in the Steamboat II / Silver Spur area, there would have been at least 25 new classrooms at that time and we would not be in the situation we are currently in. Many people called this out in 2006 when the planning was being done, but they lost and now we are suffering the consequences of the short sightedness of previous district administrations. I back this school board and superintendent is doing the research, listening to the numbers and building the schools that we need for the district to be able to house all its students.